Today we set the Way-Back machine to February 1985. Long before Depot Dad was Depot Dad, he was Depot Resident Assistant at the Kansas City Art Institute dormitory. That’s right, workin’ for the man, all for the benefit of a slightly larger room, no pay, and all the responsibility of having to keep twenty-two 18 and 19 year olds from destroying the building from within.

One of the resident students at the time was a character named Darrell. Now Darrell fashioned himself as something of a modern day Edgar Allen Poe. And frankly, he pulled it off. I’ll be darned if I didn’t imagine bats swirling around his head every time he passed by. He was generally private, but also disarmingly funny. And we had formed the beginnings of a nice friendship that year.

But on this day in February, Darrell came to my room looking particularly disturbed.

“Jim,” he said in his droll monotone voice,”Will you please come to my room? I want to make sure.....I’m not going crazy.”

Well, I wasn’t going to let an invitation like that pass by and, being the caring and supportive R.A. that I was, did as he asked.

When we arrived in his dorm room, Darrell sat down on his bed, crossed his legs and rested his right forearm onto his leg. He opened his palm face up where I could see he had placed a small unused staple.

“I’ve been practicing this for weeks,” he said,”But it never really worked until this morning.”

With that Darrell brought his other hand near to his open palm and began to stare intently at the staple. The hand hovering over his open palm began to tremble, and in about ten seconds, the most remarkable thing I had ever seen happened. The staple stood up on its end without being touched. After a few seconds it laid back down, then popped up again, then down, then stood for another moment and finally dropped once and for all.

“How come I can do that?” Darrell asked. He was quite visibly shaken. And to be honest, so was I. In fact, I think I was more upset than Darrell was. But in an effort to provide some sort of support to Darrell, I made light of what I had just seen. “Darrell, I wouldn’t worry about it. Come see me when the furniture rearranges itself.”

With that I made my way back to my own room thinking,”Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!”

Now I don’t think you would be surprised to hear that I gave Darrell a wide birth for the rest of the year. At least, I had a new found respect for his...um...talent. But that didn’t stop me from telling this story to every friend and several of my professors. I had just seen incontrovertible proof of mind over matter!

Nothing came of it. And several times when I would implore Darrell later to show me again, he claimed,”No. It is too scary for me. I promised myself I would never do it again.”

And that was that.

Until the following year, when it so happened that a friend of Darrell’s (I forget his name) from Darrell’s home town (somewhere in Colorado), from his old high school in fact, also enrolled at the Art Institute. It was late in the fall semester when one evening I was walking through the freshmen art studios when I came across this friend sitting at a table with a naive freshman girl. I stopped in my tracks when I saw, standing in the open palm of his hand, a staple standing straight up in the air.

The girl screamed and could not get out of the room fast enough. But her screams were not as loud as this friend’s laughter. He glanced over at me with a knowing smile. He pulled the pant leg of his crossed leg up to reveal a giant lump pinned to his shin by his sock band. He reached down and pulled out an enormous industrial sized magnet.

I smiled back and quickly exited the room. I ran across campus to the school cafeteria where I found Darrell, sitting across the dining hall. I burst through the doors and shouted out...”Darrell! You F***er!”

With no explanation needed, Darrell broke out in loud laughter. After all, it was a punch line he had been waiting to deliver for ten months.

“Jim, Jim,” he said in mock consoling tones,”I just couldn’t tell you. You bought it so completely. I wasn’t sure how to break the news to you.”

And that, as they say, was that. And I have to admit, that the whole experience has completely cured me of believing in any kind of metaphysical mumbo jumbo since then. I had completely humiliated myself by my belief in front of several friends and professors whom I admired. I would not repeat that mistake again.

It has also left me permanently suspicious of anyone from Colorado. So I guess you can say it was a humiliating lesson that has since served me well.